


What It Leaves Behind

by zullyquirke



Series: Andy/Celeste Drabbles [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, being mortal is hard, but getting patched up by celeste isn't exactly a disincentive, how do I human, listen andy isn't getting hurt on purpose okay, surprisingly cute for back room surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:00:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25481302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zullyquirke/pseuds/zullyquirke
Summary: Andy isn't great at not being indestructible yet. Thankfully, she has more than one set of hands at her disposal.Made for The Old Guard Comment Ficathon, requested by saiditallbefore.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Celeste, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Andy/Celeste Drabbles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1845883
Comments: 8
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

Andy straddled the old wooden stool, looking steadfastly at the wall. It was old, dirty drywall. The room was dimly lit aside from the lamp pointed directly over her forearm. It was nice, feeling the heat from the brightly lit bulb. The hands holding hers weren’t too bad either.

Well, that was a bit presumptuous. They weren’t _holding hands_ in the traditional sense. It wasn’t that kind of warmth. Though if Andy was a good judge of human behaviour that wasn’t entirely out of the question.

She jumped, hissing as the needle thread through a particularly tender area around her wrist. The hoop on Celeste’s lips lifted with her smirk. Her head didn’t move, but her eyes glanced upward. Andy’s went down to meet them despite herself.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” She murmured, tugging another stitch to tighten the wound. At first it was butterfly bandages and gauze, but as the team’s work had grown so had her need for first aid treatment. Now they were at the needle-and-thread level of their relationship. Did that count as second base?

Now that the team knew about her injuries they were inclined to help. Nicky was especially eager to help, and Nile kept pressing that out of the four of them she was the only one who had first aid training in the last fifty years.

She wasn’t wrong.

And it was nice, knowing her team had her back. But she was too used to being immortal and if she was completely honest with herself she was getting injured more often than she liked to admit. The team was treating her with kid gloves already and letting them know just how serious some of her injuries were they’d start wrapping her in cellophane.

“People will start to talk,” The corner of Andy’s lip twitched upwards. “You know, all those people you keep hidden in the back room of this pharmacy.”

“Ssh.” Celeste glanced around conspiratorially before reaching for her scissors. “They’ll hear you.”

Andy watched her snip off the end of the thread with practised ease, reaching for some dressings to clean it off with.

“You’re kind,” Andy said simply. She couldn’t keep the wonder out of her voice. After all the terrible things she’d seen in humanity recently, there were still people like Celeste in this world. Like Nile. Good people who wanted to do good things. They were the kinds of people who made it all bearable. She could use more of it in her life.

Celeste’s hands paused, her teeth worrying her lower lip. A bit of her black lipstick tinted her upper teeth. Andy didn’t say anything.

“It’s not my business,” She repeated the phrase she’d said on their first meeting, and one she’d said multiple times since. “And I mean that. But I do… worry about you,” Her confession came with a bit of pink to her cheeks. “You don’t have to tell me anything. Just promise you will look after yourself, yes?”

It was hard, she knew. Hard to care about someone you didn’t know much about. There was nothing practically Celeste could do for her worries aside for waiting for Andy to show up one day wearing a torn, baggy jacket and leaking fluids from various rips and holes in her flesh that didn’t belong there. She had to wonder why Andy never went to a hospital. She had to wonder what she did that caused these kinds of injuries over and over.

But she never asked. She never asked for anything in return. Just that Andy keep paying it forward, keep helping other people. And Celeste never asked her what she did, simply trusted that she would.

She wasn’t some young, naïve child either. When her injuries were particularly bad Celeste would talk to fill the silence and distract her from the pain. Andy knew Celeste had a sister. She was a college dropout and an aspiring artist. She had two cats, Tofu and Miso. She was trying to grow a garden on her apartment patio but she had a black thumb. Most recently she managed to neglect a cactus to death. She worked the day shift because her favourite thing to paint was the night sky.

Naturally Andy hadn’t given her any information about herself. How could she? That way lie madness, as Booker was fond of saying.

Andy licked her lower lip. This was a bad idea. But then, so was being mortal and acting like she wasn’t. Being a mortal meant there were a lot more risks in her life. Not all of them had to be bad.

Celeste had already turned, tucking away the small kit she now kept at the ready for Andy’s visits.

“Would you mind missing the sky tonight?” She offered, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. She’d been picking up men and women for millenia, but knowing she could live a normal life this time around gave it gravitas that Andy hadn’t adjusted to yet. She might not ever.

“Why would I do that?” Celeste tucked a bit of her hair behind her ear, leaning towards Andy on the beat up makeshift table they used as a surgery station.

“I just thought you might need a cup of coffee after this. Or something stronger?” She raised her eyebrows, hoping her intent was obvious.

It was.

Celeste laughed with her eyes, lips pursed. “Coffee would be nice. I’m off in—” Her eyes darted towards the rusting clock against the back wall, “Two hours. That alright?”

“I’ll find something to do,” Andy stood, relief making her a bit dizzy. “Something that doesn’t involve knives. Promise.”

Celeste was already pushing the back door open, the one that led to the alley instead of the store front. Andy grabbed her jacket.

“Well if it does involve knives, I suppose we will have a very different kind of date.”


	2. They Know Who We Are

It had not, in fact, involved knives. Andy had shown up for their coffee date without another scratch on her. And the next, and the next, and the one after that. Her team noticed, of course, but only Nile really commented.

“I think it’s sweet,” She declared at breakfast one morning while Andy was studiously examining her cereal bowl. Joe and Nicky exchanged a glance when she’d sat down, the kind you could only interpret if you’d been deeply in love for hundreds of years. Or been around them almost exclusively for hundreds of years.

Nile exhaled, puffing out her cheeks a bit as she did. “Oh, come on. How is this not a good thing? It’s going well, shouldn’t we be happy for her?”

“Of course we are,” Nicky assured her in that soothing tone he always managed. “It’s just… complicated for us, is all.”

Nile sat with that for a moment, then frowned. “Because… we’re immortal. And they aren’t. But Andy’s not immortal anymore.”

Joe squeezed Nicky’s hand under the table.

Andy reached for her coffee wordlessly.

“We always encourage happiness where we can find it,” Nicky continued. “We never know how long we have. And with Andy’s condition now, well—”

“They aren’t worried that I’ll outlive her,” Andy finally says. “Hell, for the first time in my life I have a decent shot at a normal relationship. But I’d have to tell her.”

And there it was. It dropped like a weight in the middle of their sunny breakfast nook.

“It’s difficult to fit people into our lives as it is. Allies, friends, we always have to be careful what we tell them or how frequently we see them.” Joe leaned forward. “Not just because of the immortality, though fair few wouldn’t run for the hills at that as it is. It’s the work we do. We’ve done. It’s a lot. Too much. You remember, don’t you?”

And Nile did. It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d found herself stuck on a plane with what had seemed like an insane and violent stranger.

“So. It’s going well,” Andy pushed away from the table, standing to take her dishes to the sink, “Which means I have a choice. I can let this be fun, leave soon and let it be another memory. Or I can let it be real.”

Being real, of course, risks it all. It potentially risks them, their group. Letting someone else in wasn’t without precedent, but it was always cautiously done. This conversation was clear consent from the team for her to bring her into the circle, as it was, but it was still her choice to make.

Andy gripped the edge of the sink. Exhaled.

“I’m going for a walk.”

\----

It’s not that Andy had been looking for a fight exactly, but when she’d stumbled upon one of Copley’s targets it seemed like too good of an opportunity to miss.

He was a minor target, someone who had started underground rumors about an immortal cult secretly controlling history. Most people thought he and his small cabal of believers were insane, but in a world where an entire country would elect Donald Trump to be president and believe child sex trafficking rings are being run out of pizza parlors there was no such thing as being too cautious.

She made swift work of it. She was mortal but hardly harmless. A millennia of training meant her body was trained to function on autopilot, and that was exactly what she needed. Like a gardener toiling at their soil, it took her mind to different places. It allowed her to think.

Having your mind cleared by murdering human beings was a little fucked up, she thought, but appropriate all things considered.

She liked Celeste. It was nothing like what she’d had with Quynh, but how could it be? That was centuries ago, and after centuries of being together. She’d never have anything like that again. And that was probably true of most relationships. You couldn’t just compare one to the last because no two individuals loved in the same way.

Whether it was the timing of it or the actual chemistry, this felt right for the first time in a long time. There was a lot on the line. She could lose it all. Celeste could report them to the papers, start a blog, sell them to a tabloid. Or she could innocently confess to a friend that a woman she’d been seeing was crazy. She could find herself staring at Celeste’s face pinned to Copley’s wall, just another target.

Nicky, Joe, even Nile would volunteer to do it for her. But they all knew she’d refuse. She’d take it on herself because it was her fault the breach happened.

For a moment she let herself imagine what it would feel like. The look in Celeste’s eyes when she did it. Would she be sad? Confused? Would she wonder why Andy was even there, not understanding what she’d done to the very end? Perhaps she’d know. Perhaps she’d done it on purpose, and disgust would be the last thing Andy would see on her face as the lights dimmed.

Both were impossible to bear.

She found herself at a familiar door, one that led to a hallway and a winding set of stairs. At the top was a small apartment. Small, but full of life. There was a patio flush with greenery. Flowers, herbs and vines crawled down the aged iron railings. The walls were painted a vibrant blue, shelves filled with books and trinkets separated the one room into living and sleeping spaces. A woven rug laid welcome in the living space, once plush but now care-worn. Even more plants clung to the ceiling, wound through light fixtures. It smelled like wet earth and incense combined with the cooking of whatever the neighbors made. It wafted easily through the ever-open windows. They made it easier to hear the rain as it fell.

Inasmuch as Nicky, Joe, even Booker and now Nile felt like home, this space did too. It wasn’t losing part of her family. It felt like adding onto it.

Andy knocked. The door opened.

Celeste didn’t look surprised, even as she took in the blood splatter visible under Andy’s coat. She raised an eyebrow and gave her a half smile.

“What am I going to learn about your body today?” Because that’s how they spoke. That’s how they shared their histories. Through what their bodies did and what they showed. Scars and pleasure.

Andy took a deep breath. “Actually, today I have something to tell you. A story. A long one.”

Celeste was quiet for a moment. She stood to one side, making space.

Andy walked through the door.


End file.
